Dengist Gotland - Singapore of the Baltic Sea

I've never really played tall before, so I decided I would give it a try as Gotland on Ironman (ie, start as Sweden, instantly release Gotland as an independent state and play as that country). With only a few thousand inhabitants at the start of the game, 3 arable land and no natural resources to speak of, I thought it would be a decent challenge.

* I quickly joined the British Empire and held out, barely surviving, until Queen Victoria turned the power bloc into a customs union, so I could get access to their market and start soaking up immigrants from the Empire on which the sun never sets, until I eventually reached a rather impressive 18.7 million inhabitants (on an island that in the 2025 real world houses around 60 000 souls). * Not quite sure if it still counts as tall, but though I only the single state of Gotland, I did eventually come to rule over a dozen and change protectorates/puppets around the world, mainly as an insurance for continued raw materials supply in case I would be thrown out of the British customs union. * Though I didn't make the top ten as I had hoped, I was not too far off. It would probably have gone better had the British and the Americans not decided to join up to wage war against me (I did get thrown out of the power bloc, but managed to settle for a peace agreement wherein I only had to gave up a couple of minor protectorates). * I usually go laissez-faire in my runs, but this time I went for heavy state intervention in building up the economy and granting monopolies (both in my country and abroad) to my companies (three of which managed to produce prestige goods), nationalizing foreign building levels as soon as I could and handed them over to my own capitalists. A more Dengist approach, if you will.

All in all, a decent run!